Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume ITable 1.2.1. Total Population, Working Age Population, Labour Force and Employmentin Arab Mediterranean Countries, latest available years.Morocco(2005)Algeria(2007)Tunisia(2007)Egypt(2005)Palestine(2007)Jordan(2005)Lebanon(2007)Syria(2007)TOTALPopulation 30172000 34096000 10225100 72850000 3719198 5473000 4227000 19405000 180167298Working age population 20061000 22666401 7676700 45045800 2049273 3251000 2791000 12779420 116320594Labour Particip. Rate 56,30% 44,00% 46,80% 49,90% 41,90% 38,30% 43,40% 50% 49,37%Male 83,80% 72,80% 68,80% 74,60% 67,70% 66,40% 66,90% 78,80% 75,38%Female 29,00% 14,70% 25,30% 22,70% 15,70% 11,70% 21,10% 20,10% 21,64%Labour force 11312000 9968900 3593200 22483600 875285 1308000 1493000 6389710 57423695Current employment 10056000 9146000 3085100 20443600 647711 1123780 1340000 4945636 50787827Unemployment 1092194 1374700 508100 2040000 227574 184220 178756 1444074 7049618% Unemployment 9,80% 13,80% 14,10% 9,30% 26,00% 14% 9,20% 22,60% 12,28%% Population employed 33,33% 26,82% 30,17% 28,06% 17,42% 20,53% 31,70% 25,49% 28,19%Source: National Background Papers from national statistical sources. Official figures. Average labour participation rates areweighted by the working age population.Women Remain Largely Absent from the Labour MarketIn the last three decades, one major phenomenon in AMC labour markets, besides the massive migrationfrom the countryside to cities, has been the growing feminization of labour supply, to a large extentlinked to an improvement in education attainments amongst women and job opportunities arising in thepublic sector. Over the last years, there has been a consistent trend in the integration of women into thelabour markets, as reflected in the labour participation rates. These have increased in all countries in theregion, adding between 0.3 and 1 percentage points a year over the last decades. Though it must also besaid that there were setbacks in female labour participation in certain countries, such as Morocco (wherethe absolute number of active women fell between 1995 and 2005 from 1,491,000 to 1,320,000) andSyria (where the official labour participation rate for women fell from 21.3% in 2001 to 14.40 in 2007),in both cases closely related to fluctuations in agricultural production and employment.This notwithstanding, the labour participation rate of women in AMC is still the lowest in theworld (an average of 21.64% of working age women in the region, more than 20 percentage pointsbelow the developing countries average), and combined with high female unemployment rates leads toa striking fact: five out of six women of working age in the region do not have a job, with majorimplications for equality and even development (see Martín 2006 and 2008). Taking into account thatin all AMCs except Morocco new female graduates outnumber male graduates, the waste ofeducational investments this exclusion entails is unsustainable for the AMC economic systems.Extreme cases of low female participation rates are Jordan (11.7%), Algeria (14.7%) and Palestine(15.7%). And this despite the fact that female labour force data includes so-called “non paid familyaid”. On the other hand, advances in the labour participation rates of women are often precarious: asthe cases of Syria and Morocco show there are episodes of regression due sometimes to bad farmingyears, sometimes to a reduction of jobs in the exporting-manufacturing sector, and sometimes to aretreat from the labour force following on from a fruitless job search. In general terms, the volatility ofthe labour participation rates of women is higher than for men, reflecting the more frequent entry and30